Lady Raiders carry momentum into Big 12 play

Basketball teams love to enter conference play on a high note. With that in mind, Texas Tech women's team is singing a high falsetto right now.

The Lady Raiders are riding high after toppling then-No.3 Vanderbilt on Saturday. The game was the last non-conference outing before beginning Big 12 action this week  which is not a bad way to start the all-important league schedule.

"I think we have to build on it," Tech head coach Marsha Sharp said. "It's up to us now to make that transition. We talked about that a little in the dressing room about it being a great statement for our team and now we need to go back it up. I think there are, obviously, some great teams in the Big 12 and it's not necessarily what you're going to do in one game in the Big 12, but what you do over 16 games.

"It'll be an interesting couple of months and I think if we play like we did (Saturday), we'll have a chance. We certainly want to feel like that, and we gained a lot of confidence with the win. We feel better about ourselves than we have all year long."

After Saturday's outing, they should. The Tech players shot 47.8 percent from the floor, their third-best performance of the season. Considering, however, it was against a Vanderbilt team that possessed four starters 6-foot-1 or taller, it could arguably be called the Lady Raiders' best shooting game of the season.

Add in the fact Tech turned the ball over a season-low six times and hit a sparkling 10 of 24 from 3-point range, it probably isn't too far of a stretch to designate Saturday's game as Tech's best offensive outing this season.

"That was the only stat I gave them in the dressing room: six turnovers," Sharp said. "(Vanderbilt) was in a zone, so they won't create many turnovers, but I think the fact that we made good decisions against people as big as they were is probably good news for our zone offense.

"I thought we were able to move the ball effectively enough to find shots."

Although Vanderbilt mustered much better offensive numbers than recent Tech opponents, the Lady Raiders' defensive effort still had to be considered a success. Outside of 6-6 Chantelle Anderson and 6-2 Zuzi Klimesova, the Commodores hit just six of 18 shots.

Anderson and Klimesova combined for 52 of Vanderbilt's 71 points, but found they couldn't carry the team to a win by themselves.

"I have a lot of respect for Chantelle Anderson. She's one of the best players we'll probably face this year," said Tech center Tanisha Ellison, who tangled with the all-American on defense for much of the game. "Our goal was to just go out there and try to front her and use our athleticism to try to keep the ball from her hands.

"Coming into the game, we knew she would get her points. But, the main thing we wanted to do was to bang with her and compete with her and show our abilities against her."

With the conference opener on Wednesday against Kansas and third-ranked Oklahoma following on Saturday, Ellison and her teammates will have ample opportunity to continue showing their abilities.

Of course, if that ability equals what they demonstrated against Vanderbilt, opposing Big 12 teams could have a rough road ahead.

"I thought it was a great team effort," Sharp said of the Vanderbilt victory. "It'll be by committee all year  there will be different player who will have to step up and make plays for us all year depending on how we're going to be defended."